So What Happened? View From The Ground
I can’t speak for what happened nationally, but I think my experiences on election day might be useful in determining what happened.
Fundamentally, I think the Clegg surge *did* happen, but was drowned out by the larger turnout, and a squeeze message. And it was a surge we wouldn’t expect.
Normally, a truism in politics is that the young don’t vote, and if students vote it’s for Labour because of NUS organisation. People are still saying that now. It’s nonsense, with respect to this election, at least. Normally in the UK one would never, EVER queue to vote – and when I voted in my non-student-area polling station, I was in and out in seconds as always. It was slightly busier than normal, but not *exceptionally* so.
But a few hours later, I was tallying at a polling station in a more studenty area, and it was a totally different story. There were queues that at one point reached *a hundred and twenty people*. For those with no previous experience of British elections, a councillor I spoke to later said he’d once seen a queue of three people, at the 1987 election, and he’d remembered it 23 years later because a queue to vote was that unusual. And it was almost all students. And they were *EXCITED* to be voting – coming in gangs, some dressed in costumes (one as a gorilla). And they were voting for US!
After my four-hour stint at that polling station I came away thinking we’d won the election…
In the count, of course, was a different matter.
Looking at constituency-wide results, you can see that in both Manchester Withington and Manchester Gorton, both the Labour and Lib Dem candidates actually increased their votes by almost exactly the same amounts – both had an increase of 3000 in Gorton, and 4000 in Withington. But what you don’t see – and what we could see in the count – was how this split by polling district.
The areas with no students – the ‘normal people’ areas – were overwhelmingly Labour. The split there was roughly 60 Labour 30 Lib Dem 10 Tory (with negligible numbers of people voting Christian, RESPECT, Pirate, Green or Socialist). The split in the *student* areas, on the other hand, was 60 Lib Dem, 20 Labour, 20 Tory – which lines up roughly with my guesstimate from what the students were saying that they were voting 80/20 Lib Dem/Tory.
It’s obvious what happened in the ‘normal people’ wards – these are traditional Labour areas anyway, and the turnout was up through fear of a Tory government – the ONLY stuff that Labour were doing was a ‘vote Lib Dem, get Tories, remember Thatcher? Ooh, scary!’ kind of thing (plus getting Eddie Izzard to go round Withington – presumably a popular-in-the-90s standup is meant to have got people feeling 1997 nostalgia, or something?). So they’re scared of a Tory government and come out and vote Labour. Simple.
The annoying thing is that Dave Page, our council candidate in Fallowfield, said students kept coming up to him all day and telling him they supported us, but voted Tory to get Labour out. They’d picked up on the national messages, and not realised that in this area the contest was between Lib Dem and Labour.
So we have a situation where people were voting Labour to keep the Tories out, and Tory to get rid of Labour, when the Tories weren’t even in the race to start with… and people wonder why some of us want STV…
One thing that NEEDS priority – from everybody cross-party, and whatever happens with voting reform – is a MASSIVE programme of education for young people about how the elections actually work. I heard – literally a dozen times – “You know, I never realised you don’t vote for David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but for your local one” (all of them, incidentally, said it that way, not mentioning Brown at all…)
And while this was not ‘the internet election’, the internet may just have saved the Lib Dems half a dozen seats. More precisely, Facebook may have. Talking with the students in the queues, I wanted to know just *why* so many students were coming out and voting (I was very scrupulous about not trying to talk to them about how they were voting or anything, just *WHY* they were voting). The more politically-engaged ones (relatively) said “Because of the debates. All my friends like Nick Clegg”. The rest said “Oh, I don’t really care about the result, I’m voting Lib Dem because my friends are. I just want to tick the box on Facebook that says I’ve voted”.
So ignorance and lies cost us votes, while apathy and Facebook gained us more. Hooray for democracy! I may go and kill myself now…
Quick final message before the election
Got in only 1/2 an hour ago and have to be up in 4 hours to go out campaigning again, so an incredibly brief one today. When you go to the ballot box, just remember:
Tories Section 28. Poll tax. Criminal Justice Bill. Provoking further conflict in Northern Ireland. Sinking ships that were retreating. Destroying Britain’s manufacturing industry. Destroying the mining industry out of spite. Cash for questions.
LabourStarting illegal wars, killing a million or more. Restriction of the right to protest. 28-day detention without trial. Indefinite detention without trial for personality disorders. Two beds closed in mental health wards every day between 1997 and 2007. Collusion in torture. Flipping second homes. Dropping the 10p income tax rate. The Digital Economy Act.
Liberal Democrats None of the above.
You know what to do
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election Part 2 – What The Parties Stand For
A bit later than I thought, here’s the second part of this. Before I start, some people were interested in exactly what happens in a balanced parliament situation – here’s a report from the Hansard Society (pdf) that sets it all out.
I’m going to try here to set out what all the major parties in the UK General Election believe, as simply as I can. I’m going to try to avoid words like ‘socialism’ or ‘capitalism’ because I want this to be useful to as many people as possible – I genuinely know quite a few people who don’t know even what the most basic ideas of what the parties stand for even at this late stage. It should also, though, help my foreign friends understand things a bit better. If you’re a member or supporter of one of the parties listed and you think I’m being unfair or inaccurate (within the very simplistic way I’m doing this) please leave a comment.
The Conservative Party are the simplest party to explain. They believe that, more or less, the way things are is the best way they could be. They think that the people with power at the moment (not just politicians, but religious leaders, business leaders, banks and so on – ‘important’ people) are the people who should keep power. This also means that even though it’s not actually their policy, a lot of them think that middle-aged white straight men deserve more power than anyone who isn’t a middle-aged white straight male, though some individual Conservatives, including their current leader, don’t think that. The Conservatives are also called the Tories, and over Britain’s history they have been in government most of the time. Their leader is David Cameron.
The Labour Party are the hardest to explain. They used to believe that working people deserved to get a better share of the money than they do, and that government should make sure of that, but that otherwise it would be better to give people more freedom. Labour governments brought in the National Health Service, created the Open University, ended capital punishment (hanging) and legalised homosexuality and abortion. (Many of these were Liberal ideas originally, but Labour brought them in). However, after the Conservatives were in power for eighteen years, the leaders of the party decided that people didn’t want a government like that any more, and Labour became more-or-less identical to the Conservatives. There are some slight differences – they brought in the minimum wage and civil partnerships for gay people – but otherwise they have behaved almost exactly like the Conservatives (increasing the gap between rich and poor, supporting the Americans in illegal wars). Many Labour *members* though still hope the party will go back to the way it used to be. Labour have been in government for the last 13 years, and their leader is Gordon Brown.
The Liberal Democrats are both Britain’s oldest and newest party, being formed in 1988 from a merger between two other parties, the Liberals (Britain’s oldest party) and the Social Democrats (a new party formed by some ex-Labour members). We believe in freedom – that the government should not interfere in you doing what you want with your life. We realise, though, that you can’t be free without enough food to eat or somewhere to live or medicine if you’re sick, so we think the government should do what it can to make sure everybody has those things, even if it means interfering a bit with rich people’s freedom (by taking some of their money away) to make sure poor people have them. We also think it’s worth making sure we have a better environment for everyone, because the freedoms not to choke on fumes or to have your home not be flooded by dangerous weather are also important. We also want a fairer voting system, to give everyone the freedom to have a say in how they’re governed.
We also want to make sure that *everyone* has more freedom, so we support gay people, and transsexual people, and disabled people, and other people who have a hard time at the moment, and we want to make sure they have the same rights as everyone else and can also do what *they* want to with their lives.
The Liberal Democrats have never been in government, although the Liberals were a long, LONG time ago, and Nick Clegg is our leader.
The Green Party want to protect the environment, and to share money out more so poor people have more and rich people have less. They share a lot of the same ideals as the Liberal Democrats, but we think some of the ways they want to do things won’t work properly, while they think we’re too similar to the Conservatives and Labour and not radical enough. The Greens don’t have any Members of Parliament at the moment, but are hoping to get some. Caroline Lucas is their leader.
The Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru are nationalists – they believe that Scotland (for the SNP) and Wales (for Plaid Cymru) should become separate countries. As you would imagine, they don’t have many MPs (Scotland and Wales don’t have many people in compared to England), but they both have a lot of members of their respective assemblies (the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly). Alex Salmond leads the SNP, and Ieuan Wyn Jones leads Plaid Cymru.
There are *lots* of smaller parties in Northern Ireland, where the major mainland parties don’t stand. Roughly speaking the Unionist parties (those that want Northern Ireland to stay part of the UK, mostly Protestants) will support the Conservatives in Parliament, while the Republican parties (those that want Northern Ireland to join with the Republic of Ireland, mostly Catholics) will support Labour, but some Republican parties (like Sinn Fein) won’t take their seats in Parliament because you have to swear allegiance to the Queen. The Alliance Party, which tries to work with both communities and bring them together, are formally linked to the Liberal Democrats.
Racist UKIP The official name of this party is the United Kingdom Independence Party, but I refuse to refer to them as anything other than Racist UKIP, because I was threatened with legal action for saying they are racists. Racist UKIP’s policy is mostly centred around not liking foreigners, so they don’t want to be part of the European Union and they want to stop any foreign people coming over here and get rid of some of the ones who already are. Other than that, they’re mostly the same as the Conservatives. Their leader is Lord Pearson Of Rannoch , and they don’t have any MPs in the Commons but do have members in the House of Lords.
The Bastard Nazi Party, officially the British National Party, are a party that formed mainly to hate black people, though in recent years they have branched out and now hate Muslims too. Their leader is DickIbegyourpardonNick Griffin, and they are bastard Nazis. They don’t have any MPs at the moment, and if you vote for them you are scum.
On Coalitions
A lot of Labour supporters – and Green supporters – have been up in arms for the last day or so, practically frothing at the mouth and screaming because Nick Clegg has said that
if Labour gets the smallest share of the vote of the three main parties and the most seats, he would not tolerate Brown remaining prime minister.
(from here. Warning – Murdoch paper.)
A lot of Labour supporters seem to be seeing the Lib Dems as basically the same as Labour really (in the attitude that ‘Liberal’ Conspiracy takes), and as some kind of secret backup plan – and so they’ve been incredibly hurt by this, and got angry, accusing Clegg of saying he will form a coalition with the Conservatives, and screaming ‘vote Clegg get Cameron’.
But look at what he’s actually saying:
IF Labour come third in the vote
THEN we would not tolerate
GORDON BROWN remaining Prime Minister.
What this *DOESN’T* say:
We won’t work with Labour if they come second
We won’t work with Labour with another leader
We won’t work with Labour as the junior partner in a Lib Dem-led coalition.
It’s very simple – if Labour come THIRD (not second, note, THIRD), Gordon Brown doesn’t get to be Prime Minister any more. That’s all he’s said.
I’ve spent much of this election staggered at the sense of entitlement coming from the Tories, their sense that they don’t need to actually do anything because it’s their turn to be in power – but even they don’t have the nerve to suggest that IF THEY COME THIRD they should run the country, and be angry at A DIFFERENT PARTY for not agreeing with them about that.
Just to be clear, I don’t think we will form a coalition with the Tories – in fact I would leave the party if we did so, because I remember the Thatcher and Major years too well, and even though I actually have no rational basis for preferring Labour – both parties being evil, as far as I can see – I have a visceral, irrational hatred of the Tories. So if I thought I was supporting a Lib/Tory coalition, I would leave today. It’s not going to happen.
But all along Clegg has made clear exactly what would have to be agreed to form a coalition with either other major party – tax rises on the rich to pay for tax cuts for the poor, spending more on education for poor children, electoral reform and a change from an economy based on financial services to a more environmentally-friendly one. Those don’t sound especially Tory to me.
I suspect it simply never occurred to him until this week to say “the party with the most votes should be in charge” because it would take a sense of entitlement the size of a small galaxy to demand to still be in charge AFTER COMING THIRD, and to make that demand of a party WITH THE WORD ‘DEMOCRATS’ IN ITS NAME.
To be honest, I think Labour and the Tories would make better coalition partners together than either would with us. As I said in the comments to this post by millennium, “Let the war criminals and the idiot sons of privilege go into coalition together. They deserve each other.”
In this election, for the first time in my lifetime, there’s a chance for *REAL* change. Vote for the party *YOU WANT TO WIN*. If you want a bunch of corrupt war criminals, vote Labour. If you want a bunch of inbred aristocratic cretins who think they have a right to rule because their great-grandmother slept with the Queen, vote Tory. Me, I want a Liberal and Democratic government, so I’m voting Liberal Democrat.
But if the Liberal Democrats come third, I won’t go stamping my feet and demanding that Nick Clegg get to be Prime Minister anyway, as Labour supporters are already doing. Because I am mature enough to know that ‘coming third’ is not the same as ‘winning’.
The second part of my Beginners’ Guide will be up tonight.
A Beginners’ Guide To The Election: Part 1 – The Voting System
I’ve spoken to a lot of people recently – British people who can vote, and indeed who have voted in the past – who don’t understand some very basic things about our political system. They think, for example, that the party that gets the most votes always has to form the government, or that we vote for a Prime Minister directly. Neither of these things is true.
In the UK we are governed by Parliament, which is split into two ‘Houses’. The House Of Lords is a sort of advisory body, made up of retired politicians, business leaders, bishops, and a few people who have inherited their place in the Lords from their parents. We can’t vote for anyone in the Lords.
The other House, the House of Commons, is the part of the government we can vote for. There are 650 members of the House of Commons, known as Members of Parliament, or MPs.
To select these, the country is split into 650 areas known as constituencies. In each of these constituencies, people vote for the person they want to represent them, from a choice of candidates who are mostly members of political parties, and the person with the highest number of votes wins and becomes their MP.
Note that we don’t vote for a *party*, or for a *government* – we vote for a single person. It would be entirely possible for someone to want, say, a Conservative government, but to dislike their local Conservative candidate and like their local Labour candidate. In that case, they would vote for the Labour candidate.
After the election, most of the time one party has more than 325 MPs – so more than half the MPs in Parliament, and that party gets to become the government. The leader of the government party is the Prime Minister – we don’t get to vote directly for the Prime Minister, and if the current Prime Minister resigns, or gets kicked out by their party, the party in government chooses the new one. This happens a lot – roughly half the Prime Ministers we’ve had since the Second World War weren’t the leader of their party at the election before they became Prime Minister.
However, some times no party gets more than 325 MPs, and then we have what is usually known as a ‘hung parliament’ (though some people prefer to call it a ‘balanced Parliament’). When this happens, the different parties have to discuss between themselves what to do about forming a government. Sometimes this ends in a ‘coalition’ (two or more parties working together in government, with the leader of the bigger party being Prime Minister but members of the other party being Cabinet Ministers). At other times it leads to a ‘minority government’ where the largest individual party gets to form the government but has to try to persuade members of the other parties to vote for any new laws it wants to bring in.
Now this is a simple system, but it’s not particularly fair. To see why, imagine we have three parties, A, B and C, and two constituencies.
Now, in constituency 1, party A gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party C gets one thousand votes, so party A gets an MP. In constituency 2, party C gets thirty thousand votes, party B gets twenty-nine thousand votes, and party A gets one thousand votes, so party C gets an MP.
When this happens, party B has got twenty-eight thousand votes more than the other two parties, but it has no MPs while the others have one each. As you can see, this is not fair.
Most people, most of the time, either don’t know about this unfairness or don’t think it matters, because the system we have *sort of* works – at the last election Labour got most votes and most MPs, the Conservatives got second-most votes and second-most MPs, and the Liberal Democrats third most votes and third most MPs, so it sort of looks more-or-less fair until you look at the shares properly.
But this upcoming election might be different. Because of the way the different parties have different levels of support in different parts of the country, and the way the polls are at the moment, it is entirely possible (not likely, but very possible, say a one in four chance) that the Liberal Democrats will get the most votes, the Conservatives second and Labour third, but that Labour will get the most MPs, with the Conservatives second and the Liberal Democrats third.
Many political parties (most of the smaller ones, and the Liberal Democrats) want to change the system to make it fairer. People have suggested many different ways of making the voting system fairer, and these are all collectively known as ‘proportional representation’ systems. However, there are big differences between them. The system we use for European elections, the d’Hondt system, is horrible, as I explained here, and is why the Bastard Nazi Party got seats in the European Parliament.
The system the Liberal Democrats want is called Single Transferable Vote (STV), and I talked a little bit about it here. It is both simple and fair. (Fixed – Tez Burke corrected my stupid error here).
When politicians talk about ‘proportional representation’ leading to corruption or to Nazis getting in, they are usually talking about systems like d’Hondt, not systems like STV, and lots of them are deliberately confusing the two – or outright lying – because they benefit from the current system. STV is fair to everyone. You may prefer the current system after they’ve both been described, but please do so for the right reasons, not because of lies people have told about ‘proportional representation’ as a whole.
I hope this helps – any questions?
(ETA, have corrected a misstatement of fact after Tez Burke and Andrew Ducker called me on it in the comments.)
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